war, was in full sway between Marathon and Salamis, and under its influence Sophocles must have grown up.
The system was one well adapted to bring out all powers of man's mind and body to their highest perfection. The government of Peisistratos had helped to raise the people out of the roughness of their earlier life. Intercourse with the Asiatic Greeks had brought in quicker perceptions of beauty in art, and poetry, and music. It had not as yet brought in in their fulness, though the tyrants of Greece were doing their best to introduce them, the vices with which all Asiatic society was tainted. The zeal with which Peisistratos had collected and edited the works of Homer had given the youth of Athens a basis upon which their education rested; and its ethical influence, if not always in harmony with the standard of a higher wisdom, and sometimes too subservient to the principles of despotism, at least tended to a reverence for truth and honour and manliness. The Iliad and the Odyssey were free from the deep-dyed stain of later Greek literature. They were fit text-books for an education which aimed at forming the heroic temper, and looked on the training of the body, and skill in music and poetry, as equally contributing to it. Manliness, and self-restraint, and reverence for parents, were the keynotes of the whole. We have but to individualise the general features of the picture which the comic dra-
